Robert E. Lee summary: Confederate general Robert E. Lee is perhaps the most iconic and most widely respected of all Civil War commanders. Though he opposed secession, he resigned from the U.S. Army to join the forces of his native state, rose to command the largest Confederate army and ultimately was named general-in-chief of all Confederate land forces. He repeatedly defeated larger Federal armies in Virginia, but his two invasions of Northern soil were unsuccessful. In Ulysses S. Grant, he found an opponent who would not withdraw regardless of setbacks and casualties, and Lee’s outnumbered forces were gradually reduced in number and forced into defensive positions that did not allow him room to maneuver. When he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, it meant the war was virtually over. Robert Edward Lee was the fifth child of Revolutionary War hero and governor of Virginia Henry Light-Horse Harry Lee. Henry Lee, unfortunately, was fiscally irresponsible, which hurt the family financially, and he left for the West Indies when Robert was six, never to return. Robert’s mother, Ann Carter Lee, raised the boy with a strong sense of duty and responsibility. Robert secured an appointment to West Point in 1825. Graduating second in his class in 1829, with no demerits, he entered the prestigious Engineer Corps. Throughout the peace of 1830s and early 1840s, he was assigned to posts from Georgia to New York and rose from second lieutenant to captain. In 1831 he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, great-granddaughter of George Washington’s wife Martha and her first husband, Daniel P. Custis. As a result of wedding Mary, Lee improved his financial position and his name became associated, however distantly, with the Revolutionary War commander and first president, something that added to his reputation during and after the Civil War. Robert E. Lee in the Mexican War When the United States went to war with Mexico in 1846, Lee won laurels on the staff of Major General Winfield Scott, who commanded the American forces that invaded Veracruz and captured Mexico City. As an engineer, Lee helped Scott find ways around Mexican strong points or to capture them. This experience undoubtedly played an important role during the Civil War, when he was always looking for a way to get at those people over there, the Federal armies that he often thwarted. Brevetted three times for gallantry in Mexico, Lee crossed the nearly impassible hardened lava beds of the Pedregal in storm and darkness to inform his commander of the position of Scott’s advance troops on the other side. He then crossed the inhospitable area again, guiding Scott’s follow-on troops to surprise and defeat the Mexican force at Contreras. Scott’s estimation of Capt. Lee could not have been higher; one observer called it, almost idolatrous. Lee as Superintendent of West Point After Mexico agreed to a peace settlement in 1848, Lee returned to duties in a peacetime army. On September 1, 1852, he became superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he oversaw changes to the curriculum and added a fifth year to the traditional four. In 1855, Congress authorized the formation of four new regiments and Lee, leaving the engineers where promotion was slow, became a lieutenant colonel in charge of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment. For the next six years, he was stationed with them in Texas, primarily overseeing operations against the Comanches and performing staff duties. In October 1859, while Lee was on one of several trips east to settle the estate of his wife’s father, radical abolitionist John Brown and a band of followers seized the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. The War Department ordered Lee to handle the situation and, leading a U.S. Marine detachment, he quickly recaptured the arsenal. Lee Enters The Civil War With The Confederacy Several states of the Deep South seceded in protest over the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as president, and the newly formed Southern Confederacy offered Lee the rank of brigadier general. He ignored that offer, but the bombardment of U.S. troops in Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12–14, 1861, placed him in a difficult position. His former commander, Winfield Scott, offered him command of the army of volunteers being raised to suppress the rebellion; that same day, Virginia voted in favor of secession. Lee did not support secession, but he would not fight against his native state. He resigned his officer’s commission, wrote Scott a personal message of thanks and regret, and became a major general of Virginia troops, commanding all military forces of the state. After Virginia officially joined the Confederacy and its governor transferred all the state’s troops to that body, Lee became a Confederate major general—for all of two days, after which the Confederate Congress made him their army’s third full general, ranking behind Samuel Cooper and Albert Sidney Johnston. He became military advisor to Confederate President Jefferson Davis and, on July 28, the president asked him to coordinate the defenses of Western Virginia, where the citizens were attempting to create a new, Union-loyal state and Confederate arms had already met with defeat at Philippe and in the Big Kanawha Valley. Read More in Civil War Times Magazine.... Lee committed an error common to military leaders at this stage of the war: he devised a plan too complicated for the volunteer troops and bickering commanders to carry out, especially in a mountainous area plagued with bad roads. Defeated at Rich Mountain by Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan force, he returned to Richmond as Granny Lee, his previously glowing reputation under a cloud. The Richmond Examiner decried him as unwilling to shed blood and to depend exclusively upon the resources of strategy … without the cost of life. While in Western Virginia, however, Lee first encountered Traveler, the horse that would carry him through most of the war and become nearly as famous an icon as Lee himself. Lee’s next assignment was head of a department comprised of the coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia and eastern Florida. The engineer spent four months overseeing the construction of coastal defenses. In March 1862, he was back in Richmond, assigned to manage the conduct of military operations in the armies of the Confederacy. In that role, he successfully supported a conscription act, passed by the Confederate Congress April 16. His support of the act may not have been as convincing to the Congress as the 100,000-man Army of the Potomac that George McClellan was advancing up the Virginia peninsula toward Richmond. McClellans troops clashed with the Confederates under Gen. Joseph Johnston in the Battle of Seven Pines, also called the Battle of Fair Oaks, on May 31. When Johnston was wounded and taken from the field, Davis asked Lee to assume command of the army. General Lee Takes Command of the Army Knowing he could not win by retreating into defensive works, within three weeks Lee took the offensive, initiating the Seven Days Battle, a series of fights that drove the Federals back down the peninsula. In the final battle, Malvern Hill, Lee threw his men in a series of costly charges against strong Union positions but failed to take the hill. Perhaps Lee was looking to dispel his Granny Lee reputation; perhaps he was remembering that frontal assaults had often worked in Mexico; perhaps he sensed victory was just one more charge away. Whatever his reason, the Seven Days showed both his capacity for maneuver and surprise and his willingness to sustain significant losses in pursuit of victory, traits that would arise again. Lee had driven the enemy away from the gates of Richmond, however, and his star began to rise in the South. He next moved north, his Army of Northern Virginia divided into two corps, the larger under the command of his Old War Horse Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, and the other under Lt. Gen. Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson. In the Battle of Second Bull Run—Second Manassas to the Confederates—Lee defeated Maj. Gen. John Pope. A month later, September 1862, Lee led his army in its first excursion onto Northern soil, crossing the Potomac into Maryland. That campaign ended at the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) on September 17, the bloodiest single day in all of American history. At the end of that day’s fighting, he calmly assessed that the cautious McClellan would not renew the contest and allowed his men a day of rest before withdrawing back into Virginia. The following December, McClellan’s replacement, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside, stole a march on Lee but failed to cross the Rappahannock River promptly. The resulting Battle of Fredericksburg slaughtered the right wing of Burnside’s army. At the end of April 1863, a fourth Union commander, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, tried to outflank and defeat Lee. The result was what is widely regarded as Lee’s greatest victory, the Battle of Chancellorsville. Boldly dividing his army in the face of superior numbers, the Gray Fox repulsed Hooker’s main force, then turned and stopped the rest of the Army of the Potomac at Salem Church. The Gettysburg Campaign In June, Lee again led his troops in an invasion of the North, this time striking into Pennsylvania. He was not well, physically or emotionally. The symptoms of heart disease were becoming evident, and the general still grieved the death of his 23-year-old daughter, Anne Carter Lee, the previous October. He had also lost his right arm, Stonewall Jackson, who had been mortally wounded by his own men at Chancellorsville. Lee had always shown an inclination to issue orders that gave subordinates significant latitude in carrying them out. During the Gettysburg campaign, that proclivity allowed his cavalry commander, J.E.B. Jeb Stuart, to decide on a wide swing behind Union lines that took him out of contact with the rest of the army and denied Lee crucial intelligence on enemy movements. Jackson’s old corps had been split in two, and the new commanders needed a firmer hand than Lee applied, which may have cost him the high ground at the Battle of Gettysburg. There, he repeated his mistake of Malvern Hill, sending the divisions of Maj. Gen. George Pickett and Brig. Gen. James Pettigrew across a mile and a quarter of open ground against a strong Union position on Cemetery Ridge. Pickett’s Charge, as it became known, resulted only in a monumental loss of soldiers Lee could not replace, and his second northern invasion failed. In November he turned back an indecisive movement by Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade, the victor of Gettysburg, during the Mine Run Campaign, but soon Lee faced a more determined foe. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant had been summoned from the Western Theater to command all Union armies in the field and attached himself to Meade’s Army of the Potomac. In the bloody Overland Campaign in the summer of 1864, Grant and Lee faced each other in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. Always, Lee was able to withdraw after inflicting severe casualties on the Federals, but they could replace their fallen better than the South could. Finally forced back to the Petersburg–Richmond area, Lee again used his engineering skill to create extensive defensive works that held back his opponents until the spring of 1865. Lee’s Surrender And The End Of The Civil War He was named commander-in-chief of all Confederate armies on January 23, 1865, but it was too late for coordinated action between the theaters and the dangers in Virginia occupied most of his attention. Finally forced out of his defensive works, he surrendered to Grant on April 9 at Appomattox Court House, though some of his commanders had urged him to lead a guerrilla war in the mountains. Lee’s surrender was the signal that the Southern cause was truly lost. Other Confederate armies soon capitulated as well. Read more about Lee’s Surrender Lee After The Civil War His wife’s home at Arlington had long been occupied by Union troops and its lands turned into a cemetery for their dead. Lee and his family lived in Richmond until he accepted a position as president of Washington College (later renamed Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia, later in 1865. On October 2, 1870, the heart disease that had plagued him for at least seven years finally claimed the old warrior. Read More in America’s Civil War Magazine Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!! He had become a symbol of Southern resistance to the Union armies and was made an icon of the Lost Cause in the post-war South. Today, he remains internationally respected as a daring, often brilliant tactician, a gentleman who never referred to Northern soldiers as the enemy but as those people over there, a man who opposed secession but felt honor-bound to serve his native state. He applied for restoration of his American citizenship, but the papers were lost until the 1970s, when his wish was granted. RPWPM.
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 15:49:16 +0000
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